


With Pieces Missing

by I_Gave_You_Fair_Warning



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Betrayal, Anything Might Happen Later, Despair, Gen, Hope (If the Story Lasts Long Enough- but it does not in the first chapter), Most Jedi but not All Jedi Gone, No Archive Warnings Because I Don't Know Yet, Obi-Wan Struggling With What Anakin Did, Obi-Wan's Tatooine Exile Only Worse, Palpatine is Dead, Revenge of the Sith AU, Second-Guessing Everything, Self-Inflicted Isolation, Self-Loathing, Self-Reflection, Surviving Genocide, Survivor Guilt, The Republic Stands, This is a Brain Story, Untreated Depression, Vaderkin, futility, unfinished work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-12
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-03 21:34:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13349961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_Gave_You_Fair_Warning/pseuds/I_Gave_You_Fair_Warning
Summary: We often see Obi-Wan just before the solitude of his exile, and we certainly see the polished diamond he became after... but what path did he have to walk to come to terms with the horrible things that had been done to him? This may not be that path, but it is an alternative universe's one. One where he didn't have the mission of keeping Luke safe to anchor and steady him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story came entirely out of conversations I had with a kind person. And while I can only offer up a chapter 1 and will need more brain sparkles if it's to end up finished (it's brain sparkle season; set your traps, anyone who cares to see more), I wish this individual all the best.
> 
> You know who you are, you may even recognize some of the turns of phrase. Thank you for the gifts of sparkles. May the Force be with you, m'dear. Always.

 

All his life, Obi-Wan had built up defenses against the external attacks that wanted to destroy him.

Those defenses were meaningless in the face of an internal wound, the knife sunk deep from a quarter he'd never even considered—

“Tell me you didn't do this.” Obi-Wan's voice sounded afraid in his own ears. He wasn't afraid. Anakin held  _ all  _ his trust, he didn't  _ doubt him— _

Golden eyes stared back at him through the bars of the cell, empty, without feeling.

“ _ Tell me, _ ” Obi-Wan pleaded. He couldn't have. His brother  _ couldn't  _ have betrayed the Republic to Palpatine, couldn't have murdered the Jedi at home in the Temple,  _ couldn't  _ have helped the Traitor-In-Command shred the clones' right to choice and their sanity.

Anakin didn't bother a reply, he just stared right back.

Obi-Wan pressed his forehead to the bars, feeling himself slowly unraveling. The evidence had looked compelling against Ahsoka too, but he'd never fully  _ accepted  _ it.

But Ahsoka's eyes hadn't been stained by innocent blood.

“Why?” Obi-Wan choked.

“I was loyal to the Chancellor,” Anakin replied, voice grim. “It's the rest of you who were traitors.”

“What? The toddlers? Guilty of treason?” Obi-Wan's voice broke as he choked the words out.

And then Anakin was at the bars, just inches away from Obi-Wan's face, and glaring him right in the eye. “Palpatine was the only man strong enough to really  _ lead. _ ”

“He made the war, Anakin,” Obi-Wan whispered. “He controlled both sides.”

“He did what he had to if he was going to save the Republic from weak-willed beings like  _ you. _ ”

“Why does that plan involve murder and slavery, Anakin?”  
“You despise me?” Anakin snapped back, oblivious to Obi-Wan's agony. “You hate what you see?  _ I am what you made me. _ ”

Obi-Wan found he couldn't breathe.

Anakin's fury built. “Why do you think Ahsoka refused to come back? Or your  _ precious men  _ didn't fight the orders to shoot you down? Why do you think that when the Chancellor said you had to go, I  _ knew he was right _ ?”

There were tears rolling down his cheeks as Obi-Wan took two steps back from the bars. He still couldn't breathe, despite his gasping gulps for air.

“Did Qui-Gon Jinn see what was wrong with you? And now  _ Padmé is dead  _ because  _ you  _ and people like you chose to  _ betray  _ the man who  _ did what he had to do,  _ the first  _ really patriotic thing  _ anyone has done in the last thousand years!”

Padmé?

_ Please don't say that. Please,  _ his heart begged.

He hadn't even known his dear friend had been in danger. Was he really responsible for her death?

It hadn't been a good one.

“You going to kill me?” Anakin demanded.

Obi-Wan found his hands shaking. Found he couldn't look the other in the eye and see that hate there again. “The Republic doesn't employ the death penalty, Anakin. You know that. We're not the Confederacy.”

“My name is Vader,” he hissed back. “And if you don't kill me, I'm going to  _ fripping  _ get out of here and  _ finish the job. _ ”

“Because there's children you missed the first time around?” Obi-Wan half-wailed back.

Anakin scoffed, a sneer twisting his face before he turned around to go sit on the bedshelf again. “Figures you'd be more worried about them than about me.”

“How can you— does it bother you at all?” Obi-Wan begged, needing to see a shred of the man he'd loved  _ in there still— _

Anakin didn't even bother to reply. He simply looked at Obi-Wan, and that gaze—

It was so horrible, so deeply destroying, it—

Obi-Wan turned and walked away, each footstep terribly heavy, each one very close to throwing him on his face, each one anguish.

Over half the Order lay dead, killed by men who loved them, and nearly all of the noncombatant Jedi. They hadn't even been involved in the war, but it had claimed them anyway.

And the clones. Scientists and doctors were trying to find a way to safely remove the chips from their brains, but the few who had volunteered to test out the process had either died in the operation or gone mad afterwards, with the weight of what had been done to them and their brothers.

The galaxy lay in smoking ruins, torn by a war that turned out to be utterly pointless.

All you had to do was listen to the Force to hear the wails of countless broken hearts, shattered lives, maimed bodies, splintered families.

And Anakin, his kind, caring Anakin had willingly—

Obi-Wan found he couldn't continue down the deserted hallways. He slid against the wall to the floor and wept.

 

* * *

 

Obi-Wan didn't even request a gathering of the Council to announce his intentions.

Most of them were dead or severely injured anyway.

Yoda lay in a coma and Windu was awake but bed-confined as the Healers tried to mend the bone-deep burns inflicted by Force lightning. His hand hurt, even though he didn't have it anymore. The same went for the missing eye.

“You're going to have to rebuild the lives left. Find a way to live.” Kenobi's voice sounded forlorn and empty.

Mace understood the empty pain. Surviving a genocide was something no one was meant to have to endure. And Obi-Wan's hell had been shoved down his throat by his own brother.

“Where will you go?” Mace asked, because he could not ask this man to stay, not when the very walls screamed with the blood that had been spilled. The weeping of terrified children.

And perhaps worse...

The memories of the purehearted child Skywalker had once been.

“AgriCorps. It's where I always should have been.” Obi-Wan bowed his head. In the doorway he paused, as if trying to speak, but after a long moment, he simply walked away.

Mace's remaining eye blurred with pain as he watched one of his few still-living friends leave.

Obi-Wan wasn't the man he'd been forty-eight hours ago.

None of them were.

 

* * *

 

In the end, it had been a small thing.

Not the 212 th being broken and forced to betray him.

He would have fought for them.

Not the Order's annihilation.

He would have cradled the remaining children and soothed their nightmares.

Not the death of a very dear friend.

He would have mourned Padmé, for what she had meant to himself, and to Anakin.

Not the betrayal of the Supreme Chancellor.

Evil could be found in all walks of life, and while there was corruption in the Republic, there were  _ twenty thousand years  _ of progress as well. It could not be thrown away lightly, and it was worth fighting for. The Republic was not one man. It was an ideal. And perhaps this was the wakeup call the average, voting being needed to make change.

Was it Anakin's Fall, then?

He would have stumbled through the agony, followed Duty as far as she could take him, and grieved the rest of his life. If forced to fight him, he would, but only if there was no one else to stop him. Obi-Wan knew, if the time came, he would never actually be able to kill him, and the only other way to stop him would be to maim him so horrifically that Obi-Wan would—

But no.

It wasn't Anakin's Fall.

He endured. He always endured. He forever endured. He'd known ahead of time he'd been meant for infinite suffering.

It was the pointlessness of it all.

He'd suffered before, for Qui-Gon, for Anakin, for Satine, for what he believed in and who he valued. For his men. For the Republic. For children he'd met an hour ago and could not leave to starve.

Gifts.

He'd given of himself without resentment. He loved the Force, loved life, loved seeing the two twine inextricably. Loved the freedom and right of choice all beings deserved.

He'd willingly given Qui-Gon a decade of his life, there at the end. That final gift of time and attention and nurture for Anakin that would consume the next ten-years-plus of Obi-Wan Kenobi's being.

In the end, what dragged him away was the utter pointlessness of it all.

Obi-Wan Kenobi had wanted to become a knight to protect and help people.

He hadn't been able to keep a sham of a war from wrecking the lives of trillions.

Obi-Wan Kenobi had wanted to train under Qui-Gon Jinn to become the best he could be.

He'd been a Council member and the living master of Soresu, but he hadn't been able to foresee what the other half of his own soul would become.

Obi-Wan Kenobi had wanted to train Anakin to protect him from the fate Qui-Gon had feared, to give the child the chance no one had fought for Obi-Wan himself to have.

The child grew into a man who undid Obi-Wan's entire world.

None of it, nothing Obi-Wan had ever done, mattered in the end.

Was it any wonder he found he could give no more?

 

* * *

 

He would have chosen Bandomeer, had AgriCorps still been there.

Instead, he chose Wobani. A world damaged by mining, its native species of plants and animals moving perilously close to extinction.

The endless wastes of mud seemed to reflect his soul.

 

* * *  
  


Bail couldn't understand it.

He'd commed, asked Obi-Wan to return.

The Republic was shifting. The growing pains hurt, and Obi-Wan had political insight they could use.

The Order too was picking itself out of the ashes, trying to forge some path into the future. Didn't he want to stand by his grieving brethren and help find what life meant for them now, in a post purge world?

And Anakin. He'd Fallen for love. Perhaps he could be saved. He would have to live in prison the rest of his days— choices had consequences, after all— but you love him, Obi-Wan, and how can you just leave him when you could fight for him?

Good people still lived, and with life came hope.

Obi-Wan hadn't been able to find the words to explain that somewhere in the vicious bloodshed, Obi-Wan Kenobi had died.

The shell that now walked around had nothing left to fight with.

 

* * *

 

The lone Jedi fighting for Wobani gave him copies of all her research, told him what she needed most, and then returned to her own post on the other side of the planet.

Learning.

That was something Obi-Wan was good at doing.

It was a skill he'd picked up to try to please Qui-Gon.

His grades had been exemplary, he'd earned commendations from most of his teachers, he'd taken advanced classes and worked hard for extra credit.

Qui-Gon had never seemed as pleased as Obi-Wan had hoped he'd be, but surely it was more affection than he would have received had they been bad grades.

At least now the skill could help quiet his memories, since it required total focus on mastering the material, being able to tune out boredom and distractions.

He needed these files. To memorize the images of the creatures and flora he'd come to rescue. They provided a haven in his restless nights, when every couple of hours he awoke again, either from a nightmare of memory or from the Force wailing for its lost children. For the war. So many people dying unnatural deaths before their time, in fear and agony and leaving loss behind.

If he'd had the ability to feel passionate about anything, he would have hated his connection to the Cosmic Force. As it was, his pain sapped the strength to react particularly strongly to anything in any way.

He'd fought that tie to the Cosmic Force for a lifetime, ever since he realized Qui-Gon Jinn looked down on it as less important than the Living Force. He'd tried so hard to sense the things Qui-Gon did.

There was little point in fighting anymore. The fighting clearly hadn't done any good.

The Force's terrible wails were no longer shocking, at least. It had been constant since Geonosis. And if he wanted to memorize these plant shapes, and he could find only broken sleep, he was going to have to meditate.

He folded his legs, felt the ache of the injury the second battle of Geonosis had given his knee. It had been healed for almost three years now, but that somehow didn't mean the pain was never coming back. It twinged every once in a while, to remind him that some things, once broken, are never the same again.

_ As if I needed more reminders of  _ that.

For the first time since he was thirteen years old, he just... drifted.

Maybe he'd get lucky and fall asleep.

He wasn't lucky.

 

* * *

 

Obi-Wan's fingers slipped, the cold having numbed them to the point of clumsiness.

He sighed, then attempted the knot again, steadying the windbreak made from dead branches and twine with his shoulder the while.

This time it worked.

He hadn't been looking for anything but a return of his ability to memorize when he'd settled in to meditate the night before.

He found something anyway.

A distinct impression of  _ hope,  _ and a field.

He'd been scouring it all day, searching for that glimmer.

He found a tiny, sickly Adylette plant.

So far, only seven other examples of it had been located planet-wide, and in the past two months of the wind season, three of them had died.

_ You might very well end up as the last of your kind. _

So he was building a windbreak out of whatever he could find in this dead field, in the hopes of keeping this half-dead seedling alive through the coming night.

He hadn't been able to save the shards of his own life, but perhaps he could save one stupid plant.

 

* * *

 

He couldn't, as it turned out.

The Adylette died.

Obi-Wan stared down at the shriveled stem and felt bitter disappointment.

Strange.

After that first anguish of realizing what Anakin had done, Obi-Wan hadn't felt anything so deeply as this. It closed his throat and all he wanted was to weep in frustration and perhaps demand of the Force why he couldn't even have this one _ little thing. _

But tears had never gotten him anywhere. Not with Qui-Gon, not with the Force.

Not with Anakin.

So he packed up his tent, slung it from his back, and marched across the endless mud in search of some new thing to fight for and lose.

 

* * *

 

Somehow, Ahsoka found him.

He'd located one of the dying patches of forest and built himself an enclosure out of dead wood.

He still lived in the tent, but in the shelter of the tiny stockade he kept the frail seedlings he gave long days to trying to nurse along.

They wanted to die. Some of them succeeded.

Others, like him, just had to drag along day after day. Not really living, but not at peace either.

He'd found a starving lagomorph, who now lived with him, hopping around, long ears twitching, nibbling at the food rations he offered.

It fled from Obi-Wan's pain when Ahsoka insisted Anakin had been framed. That they needed to go and prove his innocence the way he had stood up for her.

Obi-Wan didn't say a word, simply staring down at his hands in the flickering firelight.

Her frantic words turned angry, crashing against his ears like furious waves.

He still couldn't find words. Or the strength to look up and meet her eyes.

It ended with her sitting beside him, sobbing into his shoulder with a heart just as broken as his.

Obi-Wan managed to put an arm around her, but he could offer no comfort. No hope. Nothing.

She slept curled up by the fire that night, but for Obi-Wan, there would be no sleep.

Her presence was too familiar. Seeing her there, almost expecting to hear clone voices and feel Anakin's warm Force sense at his back was too much. Obi-Wan left the enclosure, walking deeper into the forest until he sank to his knees and shuddered.

This kind of pain was something that he, with his decades of intimacy with Pain, had no words for.

This was what came of fighting the path he'd always known he was meant for. For believing he could be more.

For hoping.

If he had just accepted his fate of obscurity, Qui-Gon Jinn would have raised Anakin.

_ “Everything I am, you made me.” _

Obi-Wan Kenobi,  _ farmer,  _ had been playing knight.

And everyone he loved paid the price.

When he returned to the camp near dawn, Ahsoka had gone. There was a note under a rock on which was scrawled,  _ I'm sorry. _

Maybe she had gone to try to reach Anakin, or maybe she had run the other direction.

Obi-Wan couldn't find the sheer  _ life  _ required to feel the need to discover the answer.

He didn't know.

And on his days continued.

 

* * *

 

It took months before he realized even the Force was working against him in his endeavor with the plants.

Or, rather, his pain.

He actually watched one shrivel and die as his heart throbbed so cruelly that he could barely breathe.

Of course the Force would carry his agony to a wretched creature and snuff its life out instead of carrying his hours of toil in the endeavor of keeping them alive.

The Force was like that.

Obi-Wan slid from his knees to his back, staring up at Wobani's washed-out sky and wondered again why the  _ frip  _ he was even trying.

 

* * *

 

He found the answer, less than an hour after asking the question.

He apparently couldn't keep from doing  _ something,  _ as useless as it might be.

And hadn't that always been his greatest fault?

Trying?

_ Qui-Gon knew I would leave a trail of destruction in my wake. What he didn't know was I couldn't even keep plants happy. _

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

The lagomorph sat on his chest, wrinkling its nose in Obi-Wan's face.

“I know,” he mumbled back.

Large feet adjusted, ears focused in on him a bit more—

Obi-Wan huffed out a sigh, but the creature simply rode the rise and fall of its perch and stayed put.

“The turmoil and brokenness is killing  _ me.  _ A sprout has no defense against such hopelessness.”  
The furred thing rested its chin on his chest and simply watched him with wide, dark eyes.

“So of course the answer is, if I want to keep a Wobani native species alive, I have to find a form of calm.”

An ear twitch.

“Which would require wading though the pain to look its source in the eye and come to terms with what has been done to me. And I have not the energy for something so drastic.”

Dark eyes shut, and the lagomorph heaved out its own sigh.

A twisted relative of a chuckle escaped Obi-Wan. “You're wrong. It takes no effort to wallow.”

The rodent did not reply.

But of course it didn't, why the  _ frip  _ would it? It wasn't sentient, and this wasn't some child's bedtime story.

No one was coming to rescue Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The age-old lesson the Force had been trying to teach him ever since he was thirteen and abandoned on a mining world.

Anakin didn't care anymore.

Ahsoka had fled.

Bail had given up.

Yoda wasn't awake.

Mace was too busy.

Satine...

Satine probably didn't even know where he was.

And Qui-Gon?

Well, the master at leaving Obi-Wan to struggle for life alone was proving his prowess at that skill once a-fripping-gain.

To be honest, Obi-Wan was grateful for it.

If Qui-Gon appeared, Obi-Wan feared he might just lose his mind in trying to beat the kark out of an apparition.

 

* * *

 

It still hurt his soul to reach out to the Force.

It still hurt his knee to sit cross-legged.

It hurt his ass to sit on the hard ground.

It still hurt his brain to sit quiet, to hear the silence and feel the emptiness.

It still hurt his heart to feel the terrible wound in his soul where Anakin's callous yank had torn away their bond.

All of it hurt.

But still he sat there, eyes closed, waiting.

If he couldn't bring himself to just stop eating and drinking and  _ die _ of exposure or dehydration— whichever came first—

Then he was going to have to change something, because he couldn't stand the sheer futility of working his fingers raw and bleeding to save plants that his silent suffering would murder.

So even though it had been a half-an-hour of nudging his mind towards its broken shards and refusing to take the sidetrails that mind kept throwing up in desperation...

He kept on.

The lagomorph had fled.

_ Wiser than I. _

He was struggling to find sources.

Not for the pain. That he could recite in his sleep while drunk and upside-down. Though he'd never tried that, since there was no alcohol to be had in this absolutely forsaken province. Animals didn't seem interested in making it, and humans didn't make humanitarian runs to abandoned and uninhabited stretches of mud.

The sources he couldn't find were of  _ hope. _

What had  _ ever  _ made him think he could be a knight, let alone a  _ decent  _ one?

The War had taken up all his focus until the end. And before that, trying to balance a new knighthood with an even newer Padawan.

Force, when was the last time he'd just  _ breathed _ and existed, without some desperate  _ want _ ? Wanting to save his men, to end the war, to protect Anakin.

Ha.

Wanting to raise the lonely child with kindness. With care. To find out who Obi-Wan Kenobi was apart from Qui-Gon, because the man had been his life for all of his adulthood at that point, and a large portion of his childhood.

And before that? Back when Qui-Gon had been alive?

The desire to please his master. His determination to abandon the Cosmic for the Living Force, to prove himself worthy, to  _ be enough. _

Because he was never enough.

Ever.

And before Qui-Gon?

The craving to become a knight. To make a difference. To save people, to look in the mirror and feel pride.

_ Frip you,  _ he thought, to himself, the Force, a non-existent audience— he didn't know, but the  _ hate  _ he felt in that moment needed voice.

How long could a man endure agony before lashing out in fury against the pointless cruelty inflicted on his body, heart, and mind?

_ How long,  _ because Obi-Wan had been suffering for almost  _ four decades  _ of this kark, and there was no sign of it getting better on the horizon. Just how much more could be  _ taken  _ out of him before he completely imploded?

_ Or have I already done that? _

He was out here, alone, watering dying flowers with his tears, and confiding in rodents.

His heart and mind had shattered into a thousand shards, and he was sure he didn't still have all the pieces.

That being the case, it was difficult to even want to put them back together.

After all, as it was now, he could still pretend they were all present, if jumbled.

Once he started trying to see if any of them could fit back together, could function again...

He'd start finding what was missing. Or would find pieces present, but that were too dead to incorporate into steps going forward.

The man who walked away from it might not be Obi-Wan Kenobi at all.

And he wasn't sure he was ready to lose that one last thing he had to lose.

Even if it was already gone from all reality but his imagination.

 

* * *

 

The meditation didn't keep his latest project alive.

It hadn't made the pain go away, either, but it had taken some of the frantic desperation out of his soul.

Now, when he thought of his present, his grim future, and his losses, there was a grim gritting of his teeth.

He'd seen the monster's face.

He'd have to tackle it, one of these days...

But it wasn't an unknown anymore.

_ Obi-Wan is dead. All that's left is figuring out what remains.  _

And if there was anything he could do with that crippled newborn already a thousand years old.

 

* * *

 

Obi-Wan lay on his thin mat, staring out at the murk of the sky before dawn.

He wasn't comfortable, the bones pressed against the ground had the ground pressing right back, but it was difficult to see how getting up would make it better.

At least right now he had a form of companionship.

The lagomorph was curled up behind him, its bony spine pressed into his own.

That hurt too, of course, with so little padding between them....

But the warmth and the slight rise and fall of the tiny being signified life. Life that chose to be near him, despite knowing how toxic his mind's current state was.

Hard to turn away such unconditional companionship.

Obi-Wan frowned as he sensed a tiny flame in front of him. He squinted, searching as the coming day's light continued to gather.

He found a frog. About the size of his fingernail, as brown as the mud, with bright golden-green eyes. For a long moment he simply stared at it, bewildered, because long ago Wobani had native frog species, but as the swamps were drained for agricultural purposes, they had disappeared.

One hadn't been seen in several thousand years.

But here one was.

_ Fluke,  _ Obi-Wan decided. It would probably end up dying and he wouldn't even realize it had.

It didn't leave.

Obi-Wan stared at the perfect, sleek skin covering it. The power in the tiny muscles of the hind legs. So small, so seemingly helpless, but capable of great leaps. This particular species had no way of defending itself, but it certainly had beauty despite the frailty.

By focusing very closely, Obi-Wan could see the perfect little round toes on each foot, delicate in form, with thin webbing linking them together like a fine lace.

Obi-Wan hadn't felt  _ appreciation  _ in what felt like an eternity.

He was feeling it now. Not enough to drive away the hopelessness, futility, and pain, but...

He could look this tiny frog in the eye and recognize that this creature had a silent grace that deserved notice.

The spell broke as it waddled away, uninterested in the equally gaunt human and lagomorph.

Obi-Wan sat up, every muscle aching, and crawled to his journal on weary knees to scribble a note about seeing the creature in its electronic depths, along with a sketch.

He was here to study, after all.

 

* * *

 

Winter gave way to spring.

For Obi-Wan, that meant the temperature changed some.

A couple of the trees in his tiny forest patch attempted flowers.

Obi-Wan stood beneath one, staring up at where the petals fell from the malformed flowers, dying before they really had a chance to live.

“You tried so hard to be festive,” he murmured, placing his hand against the ragged bark of the trunk. “It was a valiant effort.”

Not that anyone except for Obi-Wan would care that a tree had tried to celebrate the season of new life with resources it could ill afford to spare.

_ More celebration than I tried, certainly.  _

Obi-Wan had simply shrugged at the changing of the season.

Though...

He  _ did  _ wonder if any of the plants he'd lost in the winter might... come back. If what seemed dead and gone might have a chance to return.

He didn't put too much hope in it, though. His mind was fragile enough without offering more hopes to be smashed.

He turned to leave the tree, and saw movement on the damp, molding leaves of the ground. Obi-Wan froze, trying to see what had caused it.

There— ambling through the vague attempt at mulch—

Could it be the  _ same  _ frog? Was it more unlikely to see  _ two  _ frogs, or to see the same one  _ twice— _ ?

Obi-Wan contemplated it as he headed back to his worse-for-wear tent, only to have to divert his foot at the last second with one step to avoid squashing another frog.

_ Can't be. _

He sank to a crouch, going very still, and waited for long moments, simply keeping his range of vision wide.

After a time, movement began at a few different points, all of them small frogs.

Obi-Wan's heart made a strange bound, and his blood raced.

_ Where did you come from? _

The Cosmic Force curled around him like a comforting embrace, providing a gentle knowledge of how everything fit together.

_ Somehow, a few survived the annihilation of their kind. _

Being frogs, they had probably existed by burrowing deep and hibernating except for brief moments to emerge and mate, hoping for a day when their sun would shine again.

Obi-Wan walked to the edge of his tiny patch of forest, careful not to crush anyone, and then paused, looking out at the vast mud plains.

Callous, uncaring beings had inflicted this injury against Wobani, and then left without a single backwards glance...

_ But what they meant for greed also gave life a chance to start anew. _

The moisture of the mud protected the delicate skins of the frogs. Something that could only be described as a terrible calamity... and yet innocent life had taken it and used it to flourish.

_ Maybe, when we heal your world, we can make sure that you have safe place in it too,  _ he thought to the frogs.

Until then, the little ones would regroup, rebuild, and bask in the fact that they didn't have to cower in fear any longer.

This was their day.

_ They must be feeding on the insects brought in by the migrant workers when Wobani was being mined, since their natural food sources are long gone.  _

Obi-Wan himself had been harassed by those stinging gnats.

Not only would the frogs cut down on the numbers of the bugs, the castings they left behind would take a small step towards feeding the starving trees.

_ Someday, perhaps the flowers you offer won't be a sad attempt at joy. _

Not today, of course. Not for a very long time to come.

But...

Maybe someday.

 


End file.
